ABOUT

M. Shadee Malaklou is a critical race, gender, and sexuality studies scholar with expertise in Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Her writings intervene in Enlightenment humanism’s racist metric of time, querying sex and gender as visual markers of historical-racial difference. She dives deep into the founding philosophies of Man, finding that racial blackness has been written into the historical record as the human’s antecedent and Other, made relevant only as the constant against which human (i.e., non-black) movements of arrival and “beyond” are measured. As the bush’s proper inhabitants, racially black persons exist — according to Enlightenment lore — in a time before (human) time, characterized by undifferentiated gender and unchecked sexuality. Malaklou’s research thus re-thinks cis-hetero patriarchy as a symptom of anti-black humanism, troubling understandings of intersectionality that do not attend to this particular nexus.

In addition to writing for academic journals, Malaklou regularly publishes think pieces, most recently, in The Conversationalist, The Feminist Wire, and CounterPunch; and has contributed to Always Already: A Critical Theory Podcast as their ‘Frantz Fanon correspondent.’ Prior to joining Berea College’s faculty in 2019, Malaklou served as Assistant Professor (2016-2019) and Acting Chair (2018-2019) of Critical Identity Studies at Beloit College, where she was also a Mellon Faculty Fellow for the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (2016-2018) and a faculty curator of Beloit’s Wright Museum of Art (2017-2018). In addition to her role at Berea College, Malaklou is visiting faculty at the Centre for Expanded Poetics at Concordia University in Montreal. She received her PhD in Culture and Theory and graduate certificates in Critical Theory and Feminist Studies from the University of California, Irvine in 2016; and her BA in Cultural Anthropology and Women's Studies from Duke University in 2007.